Drawing maps is fun. Inspired by an East vs. West comparison and this map of Great Britain drawn only with pub locations, I decided to draw some maps of Germany with different points of interest and hoped for some (mildly) interesting patterns.
Data
Geospatial data can easily be extracted from
OpenStreetMap and are provided by
osm-x-tractor. Osm-x-tractor provides files for points of interest (POI) around the world such that the presented visualization can be done for any country and any kind of POI. In order to restrict the POI to churches and pubs, I used a simple grep on the whole file.
The POI files additionally contain Longitude and Latitude coordinates for all points. With the
sp and
rworldmap packages, it is quite easy to write a function in R to obtain only the points that lie within the boundaries of germany. For an example see
this stackoverflow article.
Visualizations
The first figure shows the location of churches in germany as a density and as a scatter plot.
I think it was to be expected that the density of churches in bavaria is the highest. We do not see a distinction between East and West but rather between South and North.
Below is the same figure with the pub locations within Germany.
Again there is no strong difference between East and West, but it is a bit more obvious than for the churches. A kind of obvious thing to see is, that big cities, e.g. Berlin, Munich and the Rhein-Rhur Area have the highest density of Pubs.
Sadly, we do not observe interesting patterns as in the East vs. West article mentioned above, but it is at least nice to see that we are not divided in all categories!
As a last interesting observation. According to openstreetmap, Germany has 18099 churches and 18576 bars. You can interpret that as you want...
Labels: Visualization
